01609: Rocky the Pop Culture Reviewer

For one reason or another, I write reviews. As long as it's pop culture that I experience or practically consume. I'll eventually post a review about it. Books, movies, stage plays, game apps, toys, - I review quite a wide range of things. Before I used to share these opinions on various things as part of my personal blog formerly on LiveJournal. But then the reviews started to take up more and more space and I ended up spinning off the reviews aspect of the blog into a completely separate entry - something that became The Geeky Guide to Nearly Everything.

Writing reviews on a regular basis is not an easy thing to do - at least not when you want to adhere to a certain personal standard. I want my reviews to be as objective as possible and yet still coming from the perspective of me being a geek. At the same time, I don't want to lose people in a sea of obscure geek references and thus I write in a manner that I hope is still accessible to most people. I try to give every movie or book a decent chance to impress me and avoid letting my own biases get in the way of things as much as is reasonable possible for a person of my level of passion for things.

And thus I get into weird discussions with Tobie as I try to form an opinion for these different reviews. I try to review book to movie adaptations as separate entities without comparing it too much to the source material, for example. And thus I often need to leverage his opinion as someone who may not have read the book if my opinion still makes sense. Other times I pose various hypotetheticals about what makes sense and what doesn't just to get that second opinion. Every writer needs someone to bounce ideas off of - or at least someone to act as an editor.

I don't claim to be more knowledgeable about things as some sort of basis for why people should care about what I have to say. I just want to share what I think about said movie or play and leave it to the reader to come up with his or her own decision about what I wrote. I never took any formal classes in literary criticism or film theory. I won't try to claim a work is "derivative" or that it follows this principle or that theory or follows this pattern. I'll talk about the TV show or comic book and just talk about what it's about and how I found it. That's it.

And in the end, I think that's all that you can expect from a person who writes reviews. I won't go as far as saying that I'm a true "critic" - I feel that "title" of sorts comes later once more people appreciate and respect your views and thus hope that you watch their movie and discuss it in your blog or newspaper or TV show. I'm just a guy who wants to write and thus blogging these reviews has become my outlet for these thoughts and opinions. I don't even actively market my blogs, nor do I earn enough from my passive contextual advertising revenue to even break even in terms of my web domain name costs. It's really just a labor of love.


So yes, I do appreciate those people who follow my blog and leave a comment every now and then. I do enjoy it when people even just mention that they've read an article or two.

And I absolutely love it when someone actually asks my opinion about something all because they respect my opinion based on all the reviews that I've already posted. That's a good thing indeed.